Rep. Thomas Massie Is Right About NATO.

Thomas Massie Has Introduced A Bill To Pull Out Of NATO, And He Is Right About The So Called 'Defensive Alliance'.

Kentucky U.S. representative Thomas Massie introduced a bill to have the U.S. pull out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, saying that, “NATO was created to counter the Soviet Union, which collapsed over thirty years ago. Since then, U.S. participation has cost taxpayers trillions of dollars and continues to risk U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Our Constitution did not authorize permanent foreign entanglements, something our Founding Fathers explicitly warned us against. America should not be the world’s security blanket—especially when wealthy countries refuse to pay for their own defense.”

Massie is correct about NATO. Since the Cold War, the alliance has had no reason to exist and has done nothing but start blood-soaked wars in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Ukraine.

The 1999 Yugoslavia Bombing.

NATO’s first major post-Cold War intervention was the 78-day bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999, an ostensible “humanitarian” intervention to protect Albanians in Kosovo from the central Serbian government.

But as the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett wrote :

Media reports have revealed that as early as 1998, the central intelligence agency assisted by the British Special Armed Services were arming and training Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) members in Albania to foment armed rebellion in Kosovo. The KLA terrorists were sent back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and do everything possible to incite murder and chaos. The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene and in so doing, not only overthrow Slobodan Milosevic the Serbian strong man, but more importantly, provide the aging and increasingly irrelevant military organization with a reason for its continued existence.

After bombing Yugoslavia into submission, NATO then stood by and submissively allowed the KLA to murder, pillage and burn. The KLA was given a free hand to do as they wished. Almost all of the non-Albanian population was ethnically cleansed from Kosovo under the watchful eyes of 40,000 NATO troops.

As Noam Chomsky has noted, the U.S./U.K.-backed KLA was “coming in as they said.. to try to incite a harsh Serbian response, which they got, in order to appeal to Western humanitarians to bomb.”

Furthermore, Chomsky noted that, “Strobe Talbott, who was in charge of the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing”, “wrote the forward to a book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, and in the forward he says if you really want to understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is the book you should read and take a look on John Norris’s book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That’s from the highest level.”

The so-called “humanitarian intervention” - as journalist Jeremy Scahill, who reported on the war on the ground, documented-included:

• “The US bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese citizens, two of them journalists, and wounding 20 others.”

• Killing “between 90 to 150 civilians in cluster bomb attacks”

• “ordering the deliberate missile attack on Radio Television Serbia that killed 16 media workers in April 1999, an act which Amnesty International labeled a war crime.”

• striking, “a civilian passenger train on a bridge, killing 10 people”.

• Bombing, “a convoy of Albanian refugees fleeing Serb forces on April 14, 1999. Some 73 civilians, including 16 children, were killed in the attack, which was carried out by an American F-16.”

• “The use of depleted uranium munitions, and the targeting of petrochemical plants causing toxic chemical waste to pour into the Danube River.”

Scahill noted that as a result of the intervention, “the nation of Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled, and chopped into ethnically pure para-states” and “the US and its allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs of criminals and paramilitaries spread out across the province and systematically cleansed Kosovo of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and other ethnic minorities. They burned down houses, businesses and churches and implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly expel non-Albanians from the province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with the Kosovo Liberation Army and backed the rise of war criminals to the highest levels of power in Kosovo”.

Installing A Narco State In Afghanistan.

Following the NATO intervention in Serbia and Kosovo, NATO occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, and propped up the world’s largest narco state.

The war was ostensibly triggered as a response to 9/11, but ended up being a 20-year occupation and regime change project, which propped up CIA asset Hamid Karzai as the president, who journalist Seth Harp describes in his recent book “The Fort Bragg Cartel” as the leader of “the world’s leading Narco state”.

He notes in the book, “Under U.S. occupation, Afghanistan had become the world’s leading narco-state, with an economy almost entirely dependent on the drug trade. Within a year of the Taliban’s ouster, opium production had returned to record levels. ‘The significant increase,’ the DEA reported, ‘is attributable to the fall of the Taliban, and the Taliban poppy ban.’ The amount of Afghan land under poppy cultivation more than tripled from 2003 to 2004. By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. In 2007, the country’s annual output of pure heroin approached a thousand metric tons.”

He added, “In public, the State Department and Pentagon issued sunny assessments of the situation in Afghanistan and portrayed the American-backed client state, led by the longtime CIA asset Hamid Karzai, as a nascent democracy. But in private, White House officials knew from classified intelligence assessments that all the opium-producing regions of the country were back under the control of powerful narco-warlords, and that Afghanistan, after eight years of U.S. occupation, was now producing nine times more heroin than the rest of the world combined.”

He wrote that the “United States installed Hamid Karzai, a mercurial monarchist clotheshorse and rumored heroin addict on the payroll of the CIA who exercised power and extended the new government’s writ out from Kabul,” adding that, “Karzai’s government … was a massive drug cartel that produced nearly all of the world’s illicit opiates”.

He noted that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report on Afghanistan found that, “the U.S.-backed client state was directly or indirectly involved in the drugs business at every level of government and in every region of Afghanistan. The army, police, court system, parliament, and national executive were corrupted by drug money, SIGAR reported. The border police were in on the game, as were customs officials and provincial, district, and municipal governors. ‘Almost everyone in influential positions in public life was somehow tainted,’ said the former British ambassador. As a result, the drug trade ‘eroded the legitimacy of the Afghan state,’ SIGAR found, and ‘undermin[ed] the rule of law”.

As a result, Harp writes:

The superabundance of highly potent product inundated Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, all of Europe, Australia, and the whole world. In the United States, street prices went down, purity went up, and opioid addiction took hold in a population primed for it by a decade of loose prescribing practices around pharmaceutical painkillers. ‘Heroin from Afghanistan is our biggest rising threat,’ the Orange County Sheriff’s Office told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. ‘We are seeing more seizures and more overdoses.’ The Times interviewed addicts across the country who spoke of the recent advent of ‘a different kind of heroin,’ clean enough to snort or smoke with no need for needles. ‘It is very, very strong,’ and ‘cheaper than the other stuff,’ a recovering addict in Portland told the newspaper. Reams of articles in prestigious medical journals described a rapid rise in overdoses in the United States, resulting from an influx of ‘China white’ heroin—so called for its porcelain color, not its actual origin. Even in the most remote rural counties, especially in New England, Appalachia, and the Midwest, nearly pure heroin was available on the street at prices much lower than what dealers charged for prescription opioids diverted from the licit drug supply.

Destroying Libya.

The next NATO intervention was in 2011, in Libya, another phony “humanitarian” intervention which was carried out under the pretext of stopping the then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi from carrying out a massacre against civilians.

But four years after the operation that deposed Gaddafi and turned the country into a failed state, a UK parliament report admitted that the claim that Gaddafi was about to massacre civilians was bogus.

The UK Parliament report wrote, “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence,” adding, “the Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011” and “the disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians”.

Furthermore, the report noted that, “It is now clear that militant Islamist militias played a critical role in the rebellion from February 2011 onwards,” and wrote “Muammar Gaddafi spent 40 years building an authoritarian regime in Libya. When his Administration collapsed in October 2011, security, basic governmental services, and the rule of law collapsed with it”.

The report also wrote that, “various tribes, independent militias and ISIL took advantage of the absence of a central government to seize control of portions of Libyan territory”.

Provoking A New Cold War With Russia And A Proxy War With Ukraine.

Most importantly, NATO, since the end of the Cold War, expanded Eastward towards Russia’s border and provoked a continuation of the Cold War and eventually a proxy war with Ukraine.

George Kennan, the famous Cold War-era U.S. diplomat, warned in 1997 that NATO expansion Eastward would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” adding that it would “be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking” a position he wrote which, “is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters”.

In a 1998 interview with the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, Kennan said, in reference to NATO expansion, “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war, I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong”.

Thomas Friedman wrote, “One only wonders what future historians will say … If we are unlucky, they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war”.

Despite this, NATO expanded its membership to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004.

NATO went even further at the 2008 Bucharest summit, where it announced, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, warned at the time:

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face

Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wrote in his recent memoir that some NATO member states, though, “granting Ukraine membership would provoke Moscow, leading to an increased risk of crisis and conflict in Europe”.

Stoltenberg in the book admits that, “In Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, the Russians had begun military operations in order to ward off NATO membership”.

Exactly as George Kennan, William Burns, and others predicted, the expansion eventually led to a new Cold War and a proxy war in Ukraine.

While Thomas Massie’s bill is highly unlikely to pass, it is still refreshing to see a U.S. representative see through the conventional wisdom around NATO and acknowledge the damage it actually causes.

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